Thomas A. Droleskey on the Lies of Protestantism

Seattle Catholic ^ | September 29, 2003 | Thomas A. Droleskey

[Fifthmark]

Protestantism is founded on many lies: (1) That Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did not create a visible, hierarchical Church. (2) That there is no authority given by Our Lord to the Pope and his bishops and priests to govern and to sanctify the faithful. (3) That each believer has an immediate and personal relationship with the Savior as soon as he makes a profession of faith on his lips and in his heart, therefore being perpetually justified before God. (4) Having been justified by faith alone, a believer has no need of an intermediary from a non-existent hierarchical priesthood to forgive him his sins. He is forgiven by God immediately when he asks forgiveness. (5) This state of justification is not earned by good works. While good works are laudable, especially to help unbelievers convert, they do not impute unto salvation. Salvation is the result of the profession of faith that justifies the sinner. (6) That grace is merely, in the words of Martin Luther, the snowflakes that cover up the "dungheap" that is man. (7) That there is only one source of Divine Revelation, Sacred Scripture. (8) That each individual is his own interpreter of Sacred Scripture. (9) That there is a strict separation of Church and State. Princes, to draw from Luther himself, may be Christians but it is not as a Christian that they ought to rule. These lies have permutated in thousands of different directions. However, they have sewn the fabric of the modern state and popular culture for nearly 500 years (I shudder to think how the Vatican is going to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther's posting his 95 theses on the church doors in Wittenberg fourteen years from now).

Here below are explanations of these lies and their multifaceted implications for the world in which we live:

(1-2) The contention that Our Lord did not create a visible, hierarchical church vitiates the need for a hierarchical, sacerdotal priesthood for the administration of the sacraments. It is a rejection of the entirety of the history of Christianity prior to the Sixteenth Century. It is a denial of the lesson taught us by Our Lord by means of His submission to His own creatures, Saint Joseph and the Blessed Mother, in the Holy Family of Nazareth that each of us is to live our entire lives under authority, starting with the authority of the Vicar of Christ and those bishops who are in full communion with him. The rejection of the visible, hierarchical church is founded on the prideful belief that we are able to govern ourselves without being directed by anyone else on earth. This contention would lead in due course to the rejection of any and all religious belief as necessary for individuals and for societies. Luther and Calvin paved the way for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution that followed so closely the latter's deification of man.

(3-6) Baptism is merely symbolic of the Christian's desire to be associated with the Savior in the amorphous body known as the Church. What is determinative of the believer's relationship with Christ is his profession of faith. As the believer remains a reprobate sinner, all he can do is to seek forgiveness by confessing his sins privately to God. This gives the Protestant of the Lutheran strain the presumptuous sense that there is almost nothing he can do to lose his salvation once he has made his profession of faith in the Lord Jesus. There is thus no belief that a person can scale the heights of personal sanctity by means of sanctifying grace. It is impossible, as Luther projected from his own unwillingness to cooperate with sanctifying grace to overcome his battles with lust, for the believer to be anything other than a dungheap. Thus a Protestant can sin freely without for once considering that he has killed the life of sanctifying grace in his soul, thereby darkening his intellect and weakening the will and inclining himself all the more to sin-and all the more a vessel of disorder and injustice in the larger life of society.

(7-8) The rejection of a visible, hierarchical Church and the rejection of Apostolic Tradition as a source of Divine Revelation protected by that Church leads in both instances to theological relativism. Without an authoritative guide to interpret Divine Revelation, including Sacred Scripture, individual believers can come to mutually contradictory conclusions about the meaning of passages, the precise thing that has given rise to literally thousands of Protestant sects. And if a believer can reduce the Bible, which he believes is the sole source of Divine Revelation, to the level of individual interpretation, then there is nothing to prevent anyone from doing the same with all written documents, including the documents of a nation's founding. If the plain words of Scripture can be deconstructed of their meaning, it is easy to do so, say, with the words of a governmental constitution. Theological relativism paved the way for moral relativism. Moral relativism paved the way for the triumph of positivism and deconstructionism as normative in the realm of theology and that of law and popular culture.

(9) The overthrow of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ as it was exercised by His true Church in the Middle Ages by the Protestant concept of the separation of Church and State is what gave rise to royal absolutism in Europe in the immediate aftermath of Luther's handiwork. Indeed, as I have noted any number of times before, it is arguably the case that the conditions that bred resentment on the part of colonists in English America prior to 1776 might never have developed if England had remained a Catholic nation. The monarchy would have been subject in the Eighteenth Century to same constraints as it had in the Tenth or Eleventh Centuries, namely, that kings and queens would have continued to understand that the Church reserved unto herself the right to interpose herself in the event that rulers had done things-or proposed to do things-that were contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and/or were injurious of the cause of the sanctification and salvation of the souls of their subjects. The overthrow of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ deposited power first of all in the hands of monarchs eager to be rid of the "interference" of the Church and ultimately in the hands of whoever happened to hold the reins of governmental power in the modern "democratic" state. Despotism has been the result in both cases

[dangus]

Mary is used as a symbol of the Church.

[dangus]

I'm unaware that the Church asserts Peter was present in Rome for the writing of his first epistle, merely that he was established as bishop with Rome in his jurisdiction by then.

(incidentally, Popes don't live in Rome. THey live across the Tiber, in a seperate nation that is not part of Rome, nor Italy.)

[Tantumergo]

"Is there a source where the church proclaims definitively that the woman in Rev. 13 is Mary?"

Yes - Pope St Pius X, Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II, not to mention numerous early Fathers.

Be very wary of Catholic biblical scholarship unless you know it is from an orthodox source - most modern scholars are students of liberal protestant exegesis spawned by devils such as Bultmann.

Kramer's identification of the woman as the Church is true at a secondary level, but the primary personification is the Ark of the New Covenant - Mary.

The woman gives birth to a son who will rule the nations (Christ) and is persecuted by the dragon/nahash (Herod). As both male figures are individual personages, it makes sense that the female figure also relates to an individual - there is no textual evidence at all that St. John was intending a corporate personification.

[dangus]

>>Unum Sanctum.

OK, care to explain yourself? Hermann and I just reached resolved an apparent conflict between Trent and V2. Is this what you refer to?

[Havoc]

The word 'catholic' appeared before the 2nd century as a word used in a language. It didn't emerge as a name till the time of Theodosius. A work purported to be of ignatius and purporting to be 2nd century employs the word "catholic", small 'c' adjective in the writing. Nothing more or less than a proper gramatical use of an adjective. Both books are contested as to authorship and as to which is original. Originality doesn't lend anything to authenticity. And as over half the volumes attributed to ignatius are proven frauds and of the less than half remaining most have multiple competing versions not only differing in language but in content, one wonders if the real ignatius ever wrote a word. Somebody thought he'd be useful or there wouldn't be so many people trying to prop up catholic beliefs with early frauds of his writings. But then most of the stories of Peter in Rome hailed from early frauds of Clement - yet nobody is, amazingly, affected by this fact when they are alluded to by other frauds.. Blindness is absolute apparently.
</p>

[dangus]

This meant himself?

On *myself* I will build my Church? Nahh.

[dangus]

>>Not that your point makes any sense, anyway.

I think this was the intent of what I said. If I must say it more clearly, Noone ever claimed all Popes were saints. In fact, few between 500 and 1700 were.

[ksen]

You predict the downfall of the Catholic Church and its denigration to "cult" status, and yet it has survived every conceivable onslaught of the last 2,000 years to be the faith of more than 1 billion people worldwide.

Be truthful, you have at least 312 years to go before your church has lasted 2,000 years.

[Havoc]

I'm unaware that the Church asserts Peter was present in Rome for the writing of his first epistle, merely that he was established as bishop with Rome in his jurisdiction by then.

Then you are unaware of Roman Catholic teaching. And I'm aware of Where popes live today. I'm also aware of where they lived in prior years. I'm also aware that they were driven off italian feudal lands in the 1800s by armed force. They were driven from rule because in the 1500s the frauds of isidore and gracian were exposed for what they were and the unlawful and fraudulent reign of Catholicism over Europe came to a screaching hault. Some 300 years later, the italians decided to stop waiting for the church to do the right thing and drove them out by force and siezed proper rule to themselves. Thus, no more Roman home. History is full of little factoids.

[Tantumergo]

"So what do you suppose that says?"

That you are talking out your back passage!

Of course its an adjective you numbskull - "Catholic" is an adjective meaning universal in both time and space.

That is one of the marks that distinguishes the Church from all fake copies.

[ksen]

Is this the same Infallible Magisterium that covered up for the child molesters?

Well, that was only a matter of Discipline, not Dogma.

[Havoc]

Read the original. The invincible ignorance twist was later added. Thus the church taught one thing, then reversed itself. Unum sanctum is but one example. It's just the most obvious and came off the top of my head.
If you want another, you might ask if it's still considered
proper to teach or practice the fine art of burning heretics to death. It is one of the countless things that was held against Luther.. that he said that burning heretics was against the Holy Spirit. Evidently he was right. How many do you need?

[dangus]

>>>> I'm unaware that the Church asserts...
>> Then you are unaware of Roman Catholic teaching.
Gee, thanks, that helps. Care to cite any infallible documents (Papal decrees citing the chair of St. Peter; ecumenical councils, etc.) (as opposed to the learned supposition of prominent, but fallible Catholics, such as, say, Thomas of Acquinas).

As for the rest of your screed, the Vatican is not outside of Rome because of being driven out. It has been there since long before Avignon and other exilic residences. (1800s? surely you know that St. Peters is older than that!) I've read of the site of the Vatican as ancient as St. Augustine (c. 400) (not counting exiles); it is where the Romans are said to have taken the slain body of St. Peter.

[DONRULES]

The bible say's that God promises that he will never leave you nor forsake you. Fear God not man. Put your faith on the relationship with Jesus Christ, and not the doctrine of the catholic belief.

Who's being persecuted?
I think that God is being left out here.

[Havoc]

That I'm talking out my back passage. You try to pass off an adjective as a name - Lower case use of an adjective does not equate to uppercase use of a Name. If one were to infer that Theodosius drew from this odd copy presuming to be from ignatius as inspiration, it lends no creedance to earlier usage. This is akin to calling desktop Pcs Abacuses and then trying to say desktop Pc's have been around for thousands of years. But then backward application of terms in pretense of garnering support for ideas is nothing new. Try looking up when the term Pope came about. It was fraudulently backwardly applied after the term and office was created. Talk about desparation.

If you want to argue something, stay on point. catholic is an adjective and was used only as an adjective in the passage you cite. If it had been used as a proper name, then you'd have something by way of citation. That you can't differentiate between the two speaks for your intellectual prowess or integrity - you pick which.

[Havoc]

Why not just go ask some other Catholics. This must be one of those things that they changed teachings on or something.

The proper history of the Vatican is that the site was a burial yard for the nearby circus of nero. It was a mass grave. In about 170 if memory serves, a shrine was erected on that hill and it was later seized upon by the Roman sect when the Vatican was commissioned. It wasn't by accident.
Nor was it an accident that a shrine erected on a mass grave should have bodies under it. And I use the word shrine for a reason, it wasn't intended as a grave marker any more than a shrine to Mary in Mexico is a marker for her grave site. There is literally no hard physical evidence that Peter ever stepped foot in Rome outside of hearsay and writings that have been proven fraudulent from which the hearsay erupted. Claims are hollow till proven.
But stubborn facts are fixed and immovable.

You're the one that wanted to split hairs over location. If you want to drum up a non argument and pretend it has some worth, waste someone elses time.

[Aliska]

Yes - Pope St Pius X, Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II, not to mention numerous early Fathers.

As applies to that specific passage or Marian theology in general?

Be very wary of Catholic biblical scholarship unless you know it is from an orthodox source

This one was offered by TAN books. You can't get much more orthodox than that. I believe it was copyrighted in the 50's or 60's.

He studied the Book of Revelation for 30 years, but maybe he wasn't eminently qualified, or maybe his book slipped through the cracks with the imprimatur. Even an imprimatur is no longer a guarantor of truth imho, as per Gobbi and his private revelations and a book by some New Orleans charismatics who got an imprimatur from Cardinal Sin. Why they didn't go through the New Orleans bishop . . . I can only conclude that they may have resorted bishop shopping to get what they wanted.

That's what you have to deal with trying to get to the bottom of things.

Thank you for tackling my question.

I didn't like the way the article got so in-your-face to protestants (it came across to me as arrogant and insulting). It is hard for anybody to be objective when they feel under fire by one side or the other.

[Tantumergo]

"Try looking up when the term Pope came about."

Again - more verbal diarrhoea from you.

As you cannot seem to grasp that a word can be an adjective that with continued use becomes a proper name, then you will no doubt lack the IQ to grasp that Isaiah prophesied that Christ's vicar would be a Pope.

Of course that would be around 700 years before Christ was born, but I suppose this was Roman manipulation of the scriptures as well wasn't it?

[Havoc]

I think this was the intent of what I said. If I must say it more clearly, Noone ever claimed all Popes were saints. In fact, few between 500 and 1700 were.

Saint is a relative term. Just one in many that Catholicism redeined for it's own ends. But you're off point and into some light hand wringing here. I'll take that as a ceeding of the point.

[Wrigley]

Pay attention, I'm sure you'll see it in this thread.